The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : A tough job on hand for police

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Feb 03, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

A tough job on hand for police

The nine murders in Cyberabad Commissionerate have turned out to be serial killings, writes MARRI RAMU

The victims are middle-aged, lonely and housewives. Killers took away jewellery worn by the women. Absence of struggle marks indicate the victims knew the killers.

These and other similarities point to the possibility of same people being responsible for killing Vittal Ratnam and Renuka Reddy in separate incidents with a gap of 18 months in Amberpet.

Vittal Ratnam was found murdered in the drawing room of her house, when her husband returned home on the night of June 15, 2005. Four bangles and a `mangalasuthram' were taken away but everything else in the house was intact. Forensic doctors surmised that she was smothered to death.

On January 17 this year, Renuka Reddy was seen lying dead in the kitchen of her flat. Her husband and son were abroad. The son smelt rat as she failed to answer the phone calls the previous night and sent his friend to the house. The house was bolted from outside when the friend arrived.

If stealing valuables was the motive, the offenders should have ransacked the houses. But they didn't do that. A box of jewellery lying on the bed in Reddy's house was also left untouched. Then, what prompted them to kill the women, who could not even resist them?

Police believe that the victims knew the intruders, as there were no signs of forcible entry. The frequent visitors, relatives and the daily vendors like milkmen, were questioned but the police could not make any breakthrough in both the cases. They do not hazard a guess as to whether both the murders are connected.

Interestingly, another incident, that of killing an 80-year-old widow, Sankar Ambali Narayana Rao in Mahendra Hills in August 2006 also has some similarities to these two cases.

These murders pose a fresh challenge to the police, as the nine murders in Cyberabad Commissionerate turned out to be serial killings by the same offenders and not isolated incidents, as believed earlier.

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Andhra Pradesh